


The Continuing Buzzkill of "His Last Vow"

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Meta, Nonfiction, SPOILERS for "His Last Vow", murderer!Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-10
Updated: 2014-02-10
Packaged: 2018-01-11 21:03:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1177903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I come to terms with what "His Last Vow" did to my emotional connections to John and Sherlock. And am sad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Continuing Buzzkill of "His Last Vow"

You know, after I finished watching Series 2 of  _Sherlock_  my brain started generating fanfic about it pretty much right away. It was awesome. What with parenting it had been a long time since I’d written fiction of any kind, and it felt so good to get back into doing it again. I really enjoyed putting those two stories together, independent of the feedback I got for them, which was of course also nice. I’ve been a Sherlock Holmes fan for over 30 years, and I love Holmes and Watson and their world more than I love most of the gatrillion other fictional worlds I’ve encountered since them, excellent though bajillions of them have been, just because they were there at the beginning.

Post-series 3, I’ve been thinking, well, maybe I could do something with this. You know, Harry’s gone, but maybe I could do something with Mary, or…

Or forget it. Because the desire is not there. Series 3 does not make me feel like generating more of this show.

In my first response to this, I focused on Mary’s character and what happened to her. But having had a while to process that, I think that over the long term the reason the thrill is gone has more to do with what happened to John and Sherlock. “The Empty Hearse” was not what I had been envisioning, but evaluated on its own terms it was quite enjoyable. “The Sign of Three” I really loved, except for the pretty weak ‘case’ and the unnecessarily long drunk!section. I even went off and wrote an eeny weeny little fic about it.

"His Last Vow" pretty much nipped that in the bud. And that’s because:

 **1) Addictedtopsychopaths!John. I just can’t**.

First of all, I don’t read either the canon Sherlock Holmes or Cumberbatch’s Sherlock as a psychopath, but I don’t feel like getting bogged down in definitional arguments. But it does truly bother me that John just accepts Sherlock’s explanation for why he married one, because a) I think it’s bullshit and b) if in fact it’s not bullshit, then I’ve been basically wrong about who John is as a character for 3 years. Sure, he likes the excitement, the danger, the thrills, etc. That’s pretty different from wanting to surround yourself with people who don’t care about you and only want to manipulate you and lie to you. (Yes. Sherlock does all that. But he also is genuinely attached to John, which is something that does not happen to psychopaths. Also, Sherlock lies to John fairly often, but one thing he has never done is pretend to be anything other than what he is, which is no doubt one of the things that attracted John to him in the first place.)

It seems obvious to me that John would have married Mary because he liked the person that she was pretending to be. I liked that person too. I’m pretty pissed off that that person no longer exists and in fact never existed. WTF is he married to now? We don’t really know anything about her, apart from her being a stone cold killer. I cannot understand why either of them trusts “Mary” now, or why John thinks he can stay in a relationship with someone he will never really know. If we knew anything about their relationship prior to their engagement maybe that might make some sense; but we don’t. We don’t know how they met, why they met, who pursued who, or any of it. You’d think Sherlock would be interested in these questions, since you’d think it would be vitally important to establish whether “Mary” got into this relationship because she wanted something out of John, or whether she was just hanging out and biding her time and John happened to come along. But he’s not interested, because Moffat’s not interested, because Moffat’s never actually interested in consequences, but again, let’s not go down THAT road.

**2) But actually, a bigger problem for me is murderer!Sherlock.**

Yes, I remember that “Study in Pink” ends with John killing for Sherlock. I also remember that he does this because he’s convinced it’s the only way to save Sherlock’s life. I might also point out that John gets Jeff in the shoulder, which if we’re following His Last Vow logic means John didn’t intend to kill Jeff (since according to HLV logic, a shot to anything that’s not the head is not a kill shot). From John’s POV that’s self-defense (by proxy) and probably no different from what he did in Afghanistan.

What Sherlock does at the end of HLV is an execution. We can presume Sherlock initially intended for things to go down differently at Appledore, but he does ask John before they leave where his gun is, and he’s had the whole face-flicking scene to think about his options. I understand we’re supposed to read Magnussen’s execution as a ‘gift’ to John—just like Sherlock reads the near-fatal chest wound he received from “Mary” as her ‘saving his life.’ 

It does not work that way for me. All along I have been more or less able to see canon Sherlock Holmes there in Sherlock, warped and distorted as he always was. After this, no. This is not something Sherlock Holmes would have done. In "Charles Augustus Milverton" he stops Watson from intervening when the mysterious woman shoots Milverton; but that's because it's already too late to affect the outcome. There is, to me, a signficant difference between that and deliberately shooting Milverton himself. As for Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes always assumed they would die together, and the final struggle is set up as a formal duel between equals; Holmes saves himself at the last minute, and again, it's self-defense, since Moriarty is trying to kill him.

It’s not something the Sherlock of series 1, even, would have done. (In “Study in Pink” Sherlock takes John’s shooting of Jeff seriously, at least long enough to ask him what it meant to him, pointing out that ‘you did just kill a man.’) For those of you who love Sherlock even more as someone who’s risked his own life and freedom by executing a slimebag for the sake of his beloved pressure point, well, that’s awesome and I’m happy for you. I, personally, cannot feel the same way about the character now. I don’t love murderer!Sherlock, I don’t really even like him, and I’m not interested in making up adventures for him.

Moffat, as I know from the Doctor Who experience, sees his plots as disposable. Once they’re ‘resolved,’ often by a process which is not easily distinguishable from magic, everyone forgets about them and moves on. For me that’s not how it is. Every plot changes the characters and my own relationship to them. This was not a good change. Oh well. 

I also don’t like it that there will be no consequences for Sherlock’s shooting Magnussen…because basically we’ve now established that Sherlock can kill with impunity. I don’t see that taking this show in any direction I’m going to enjoy.

It is comforting to know, however, that Sherlock Holmes will survive. He’s survived countless other adaptations, some good, some bad, and some pretty ugly; and another will one day come along. This one had great promise and produced a lot of great things in its first two series. I think we’ve seen the best of it; I’m not sure how long I will stick around for the worst of it. But there will be another one, someday, that will have learned from this one, and it will be better.


End file.
